In many technical fields, such as television and telecommunications, technical advancements have led to a huge evolvement of the capabilities and performance of devices used in those fields, both in terms of client devices and server devices. Despite the continual evolvement of such devices, there is still a need to support legacy protocols and services, particularly when replacement alternatives have not taken full effect.
One area of technological advancement is the smart phone evolution. Today a smart phone is better described as a portable computer with mobile data access that also can receive phone calls. Legacy services such as short-message-service (SMS) messaging still need to be supported even if alternative forms of messaging exist, such as iMessage™.
Another area of technological advancement is the television and set-top-box (STB) evolution. Today a modern STB has a broadband connection and can view On-Demand or Linear content via MPEG or Adaptive Streaming via a broadband connection, while still receiving Linear TV transmissions via legacy digital video broadcast (DVB) protocols such as DVB-C/T/S.
Focusing into the details of legacy protocols (such as DVB), one can see that they often contain identifiers. Identifiers are used as unique references for entities such as television programs, channels, and so on. In telecommunication applications identifiers are also used in applications such as SMS messaging, whereby an identifier is used to identify a particular message, or message thread.
A problem with such legacy systems is that new devices would like to extend the existing legacy protocols to carry additional information. However, due to protocol limitations, existing legacy devices and/or existing infrastructure, this might be impossible or too costly.